Books on Tape

Catching Up With the Classics
Want to catch up on your reading while driving cross-country? Or dip into the classics while sunning with eyes closed on a secluded Caribbean beach? A California outfit called Books on Tape makes it happen.

Described as the "thinking man's answer to CB radio," Books on Tape was conceived in Los Angeles a few years back to aid long-haul commuters avoid "cerebral atrophy" occasioned by long traffic tie-ups on freeways.
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Clients are able to rent the cassettes at fees ranging from $6.50 to $7.50 for a complete work, based on a one-month rental period, plus $1.75 for postage and handling. If one had to buy the tapes, the purchase price would be somewhere around $50.

Condoleeza Rice (one 'z')

Faces of the Summit: The Supporting CastCondoleeza Rice "“ Senior director for Soviet affairs on the National Security Council staff . . . A former associate professor of political science at Stanford University . . . At the age of 35, one of the youngest senior officials in the White House and one of the few women to hold a senior position there . . . Assigned to travel with Mr. Gorbachev to Minneapolis and San Francisco . . . Has a doctoral degree in international studies from the University of Denver . . . Worked on strategic nuclear policy at the Joint Chiefs of Stafffrom 1986-87.

Condoleezza Rice (correct spelling)

The Great Beyond
''NOW IT IS TIME TO MOVE beyond containment,'' President Bush told the Texas A & M graduating class on May 12, 1989, ''to a new policy for the 1990's - one that recognizes the full scope of change taking place around the world and in the Soviet Union itself.''

In subsequently defining his foreign policy, the President has quoted himself saying those words - ''I call it 'beyond containment' '' -evidence that he considers the phrase the one that he wants to be used in any labeling of his foreign policy. White House staffers tell me, in passionate anonymity, that (contrary to the claims from Foggy Bottom) the persons who put the idea on paper before the President are Robert Blackwill, the European and Soviet Affairs man at the National Security Council, and Condoleezza Rice, the resident Sovietologist.

Tina Fey

A Talk Show for an Indelicate AgeSaturday Night Live, which has been lampooning The View in a recurring skit since late last year, already counts the routine among its classics. "It's great material for us, because we really don't have to heighten the reality much to make it absurd," said Tina Fey, one of the writers who created the sketch. She knew The View was ripe for parody the moment she saw Ms. Vieira give Wesley Snipes a spontaneous lap dance on air.

Blog

'Blog' Technology to Be Licensed
Trellix, which lets clients like About.com provide site-building tools and Web server space to their users, plans to announce today that it has licensed from Pyra Labs technology that provides an easy and fast way to publish a personal site known as a Web log or "blog."

Blogs

Internet Experts Wonder if Weblog Technology Is a Powerful New Media Species, or Just Another FadFor the last two years or so, so-called Weblogs have slowly built a following among Internet users who like to dash off a few random thoughts, post them on a Web site and read similar musings by others. In the last two months, the universe of Weblogs has grown more quickly, with mainstream media analysts praising ''blogs,'' as the sites are known, for bringing a new type of expression to the Internet, and perhaps undermining the hegemony of global media giants.

But is this a truly new media species, with the power to command the attention of big Internet media companies? Or is it simply that in this, the Internet's fallow period, anything even remotely buzzworthy is given more of a spotlight than it deserves. Is the Weblog, in other words, a fad that is destined to fade?
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But even among those whose Weblogs have gained notoriety, there are some who see this trend as ephemeral. Take Mark Hurst, who created a Weblog, goodexperience.com, in 1999 that he said attracted thousands of readers. Mr. Hurst, the president of Creative Good, a Net consulting firm in New York, eventually stopped posting daily remarks on the Web site and instead simply e-mailed a compendium of comments to a subscriber list that now numbers nearly 50,000 people.

"If you want to communicate with people, e-mail it to them," Mr. Hurst said. "Don't force them to come to your site every day to read what you've written."

Bobblehead Doll

Don Imus: It's a Hideous Life, and You Get to Hear All About ItIf he didn't invent shock jockery, he pioneered it, siring WXRK-FM's Howard Stern, among others. "People perceive me as Howard Stern," Mr. Imus, who reportedly earns $2.5 million a year, says off the air, seated in a reclining chair in his cluttered station office. "It's not the case. I'm Howard Stern with a vocabulary. I'm the man he wishes he could be."
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Mr. Imus's four interviews with Bill Clinton -- three before the election, one after, and two of them broadcast live on the "Today" show -- vaulted him out of the dirty-deejay hamper. Mr. Imus credits himself with reviving Mr. Clinton's New York primary campaign and thus assuring his election.

"My man Bubba," as Mr. Imus calls him, may keep a Don Imus bobble-head doll on his Oval Office desk (there are snapshots to prove it), but Mr. Imus has not refrained from calling the President "that pantload in the White House," or simply "Fatso."